Re: Pocahontas- my 8th great grandmother

Hello Lorraine - I hope you see this as I cannot get your email of Genforum. I get the feeling from your post that you don't realize that if your Aunt has the actual diary of Pocahontas she has something priceless - there are museums and libraries on both sides of the Antlantic that would pay enormous amounts of money to own it and scholars who would do practicaly anything to get a copy or just see it.

My first thought upon reading your post was disbelief - being a descendant of Pocahontas myself I have done a fair amount of research and came away with the feeling that we would never know more about her than has been published unless someone in England could discover a few lines about her in a hitherto unpublished diary of someone from the 1600's. But from reading other posts on the Pocahontas forum i get the feeling there are people who have fragments ofunpublished information about her that are probobly legitimate.

PLEASE before that manuscript is damaged destroyed or lost get a copy made (!), even if it is only made by camera. Get close ups of each page too , a couple shots per page. And then get someone to publish it. There is a whole community of scholars out there that have a right to see it , not to mentioned thousands of interested descendants. The standard belief of scholars is that we know very little of what Pocahontas said or thought. That has opened up an area of highly speculative (and highly suspect) scholarship that I am afraid paints her with an innacurate brush. BY the way, your Aunt who owns the diary legaly has the right to the copyright of it ( which is very valuable)- no one else seeing it has the right to publish it's contents until she has published it first. Please contact me at the email below - I really would like to see that diary or help in getting it published! Susan H. sleefd@sssnet.com